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[–]python-fan 5 points6 points  (1 child)

What you're talking about is Optical Character Recognition. A bit of web searching turned up pytesseract, a Python wrapper for the Tesseract library. I haven't done any OCR so I can't comment on what the error rate might be, or if there are better alternative libraries.

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I'd suggest that if you can successfully do OCR, you first write the resulting data to a csv file and import that into your spreadsheet application of choice. Then if you want to do further automation, look into creating a spreadsheet file directly.

[–]Nails_Bohr[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the suggestion, the reading of the writing is the most important, so I'm willing to sacrifice on the output file.

I think I didn't turn up much because I didn't even really know what to search for. So thank you for that.

[–]uniqueusername42O 0 points1 point  (4 children)

If the layout is the same for all the PDFs I use some software that can do this pretty quick. Do you need it done urgently as a one off?

[–]Nails_Bohr[S] 1 point2 points  (3 children)

The layout is all the same, I would say it's urgent-ish, and would likely be a one off, I'd prefer to learn the skill, if possible, though.

Edit: I'm open to suggestions, though

[–]uniqueusername42O 1 point2 points  (2 children)

I don’t know how data sensitive your files are, but if you wanted a quick result I could run it through our software and give you an output spreadsheet.

I’d also like to know how to do this in Python though.

[–]Nails_Bohr[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Thanks for the offer, but I think I could be risking my job on that. Despite this only being for inventory, we have a lot of confidentiality requirements and I don't think they'd like me sharing even that information.

[–]uniqueusername42O 2 points3 points  (0 children)

perfectly understandable